IT pro gets prison time for sabotaging ex-employer's system

Chris Kanaracus |
May 22, 2014

A former network engineer for oil and gas company EnerVest has been sentenced to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty in January to sabotaging the company's systems badly enough to disrupt its business operations for a month.

A former network engineer for oil and gas company EnerVest has been sentenced to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty in January to sabotaging the company's systems badly enough to disrupt its business operations for a month.

Ricky Joe Mitchell of Charleston, West Virginia, must also pay US$428,000 in restitution and a $100,000 fine, according to an announcement this week from U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin's office.

In June 2012, Mitchell found out he was going to be fired from EnerVest and in response he decided to reset the company's servers to their original factory settings. He also disabled cooling equipment for EnerVest's systems and disabled a data-replication process.

Mitchell's actions left EnerVest unable to "fully communicate or conduct business operations" for about 30 days, according to Booth's office. The company also had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on data-recovery efforts, and part of the information could not be retrieved.

"Imagine having your company's computer network knocked out for a month," Goodwin said in a statement. "In this day and age, that kind of attack is devastating."

Mitchell's actions cost EnerVest well over $1 million, according to the indictment against him.

Mitchell had faced up to 10 years in prison as well as three years of supervised release, but could serve less than the four years thanks to federal guidelines providing up to 54 days off per year for good behavior.

He's not the only IT professional in recent memory to take revenge on an employer, although Mitchell's actions caused more economic damage than others.